Out of India

by Michael Foss

  *

  It was a surprise to a British boy to discover that we were not the only foreigners in Delhi. In fact, were we foreigners? We had within us a presumption of ownership. But suddenly the Americans had arrived. One day – I cannot recall how or why we met – a rangy specimen of irrepressible manhood came into the lives of my brother and myself: Sergeant Brad of the US Army. He was a tall gingery enthusiast for life, with a crew-cut and deep scars of acne on his neck, broken veins in his cheeks, and a nose that had peeked over the rim of many a glass. He seemed to have a kitbag full of bonhomie. He accepted us as he would a couple of tail-wagging dogs, both amused and puzzled by our blank ignorance of the American way. He himself, from some dreary sweep of Midwestern cornfields, had never been east of the Missouri until 1943, but he regarded the known facts of American life as the equivalent of universal knowledge.

  ‘Howd’you like that!’ he would roar with noisy wonder. ‘Y’mean you didn’t know that?’

  He liked to take us in hand and get us alongside reality. He was proud to be American and eager to lay out the benefits for a more general view. To our joy, he was prodigal with Wrigley’s gum and Coca-Cola and American comics, and for these at least we were willing to suffer instruction. He took us thoroughly into US Army life.

  ‘You guys hungry?’ he would enquire, hustling us into the mess hall. ‘OK, soldier, move your butt over and let these little fellas get in here. Hey, Lenny, how about some chow for our Limey friends?’

  Then I had set before me dishes that seemed incongruous in the extreme. Many of them had a vile look about them: toast fried in egg with syrup poured over it; sweet pancakes with bacon, again with syrup; chicken ringed with pineapple; pies made out of pumpkin. Often I hesitated and this slowness seemed part of the unsatisfactory way I ate.

  ‘Lemme show you,’ said kindly Brad. ‘Cut ’em up with your knife and then lay it aside. Switch the fork to that hand and kinda spear the pieces one by one, so you don’t get in a mess.’

  It looked to me like a laborious and unnecessary process. But I was willing to try, waiting for the inevitable question, ‘Ready for another Coke?’

  I was.

  Soon, we ran into trouble at home on account of our American friend. The comics did it – that particular type of American comic – those depraved pictures of cruelty and pain, high-coloured, with males mightily muscled and crotch-bulging, and females pared to large curves and a dab of tiny panties. Used to the Beano and the Dandy I was aghast at such a graphic celebration of violence and sadism. Yet the combination of naturalism in portraiture and twisted fantasy in the storyline had a strong subversive hold. Evil looked muscular, daring and zestful. The depravity was heroic.

  We hid the comics under the mattress or at the back of the high shelf in the clothes cupboard, but that was not enough to escape my mother’s keen eye and ever-exploring hand. She took a comic to my father, being unable to look at such muck herself. Father was severe. Where had this come from? Oh, we said airily, those comics were everywhere on the US base, which was true and didn’t incriminate Sergeant Brad. Then father spoke to us of common decency and the horrors of violence. He made no comment on the latent sexuality of the sadism, on the priapic thrust of the drawing. But he ordered us to cut out all comics from the base, and in general to keep away from American GIs as much as possible. There were elements in their culture it was best not to see. They lived life to another plan, which was energetic and open (my father did not object to that), but sowed seeds for too much grief and violence.

  Still we sneaked away to the base and occasionally Sergeant Brad drove us home. One early afternoon, being rather late, we pressed for a lift and he jumped to it with his usual good humour. He drove with exhilarating carelessness, a boot resting on the cut-away door-frame of the jeep, his face beaming out like a lighthouse. He was slightly drunk, though I didn’t see it then, taking his erratic runs and swerves as natural American elan. He insisted on coming right to our quarters. My mother, who was home alone, greeted him with a cautious and reserved handshake. Good manners demanded politeness, but he was only a sergeant and an American at that, and he was acting distinctly odd. Too jolly and friendly, respectful but with an under-current of almost winking intimacy. My mother, when she was socially nervous, put on a distant haughtiness and disdain. She offered him a glass of beer, which was certainly a mistake, and indicated a chair into which he dropped heavily with a profusion – too many – of thanks. It looked as if adults were going to start chatting, so we boys quickly got out of there.

  Years later my mother told me what had happened, the embarrassment of it still making her eyebrows shoot up in surprise.

  ‘I had such trouble with your Sergeant Brad,’ she said accusingly. ‘He began talking such enthusiastic rubbish. Very disconnected, you know. And then he insisted on showing me photos of all his family, though he could barely get his wallet out of his back pocket. Such coarse faces, all grinning and sunburnt, and the little girls in such unsuitable dresses. Everyone seemed to live in a jumble – people, dogs, cars, farm implements, and long ugly fields in the background. He’d had one or two beers by this time, and then the photos started to make him maudlin. He kept appealing to me as a mother – I had no idea what he meant – and then he squeezed a few tears from his eyes and insisted that he’d like to come and sit next to me. Well, that just simply wasn’t on, was it? He got up and lurched rather, in my direction. I was horrified, so I rushed to the door and called for the bearer. That was enough to sober him up a bit, and the bearer and I were able to get him out of the house, though he was unsteady and ready to make a grab for me, if only to keep himself straight. He kept saying “Ma’am this, and Ma’am that” and how he hoped there was no offence, and what “great little boys” I had. And then he almost fell on his nose getting into his jeep. Really, it was dangerous to let him drive, but I couldn’t wait to get shut of him. And do you know, when I went back into the sitting-room, I found that he’d leaked a puddle onto the cushion of the chair!’

  Poor Sergeant Brad, so excitable, so lonely, so confiding. He was very far from home. The war-world had given him harder matter than he had learnt how to chew. He wanted reassurance – the mother’s hand. There was some sexual expectation there too, with his itch for love unsalved by the mysteries of Eastern coupling. But he wanted to be soothed as much as he wanted to be excited. He wanted the security of family, and in some sense he had tried to burrow into ours. But at this, my mother did take offence.

  After this, Sergeant Brad dropped away. We lost an American friend, and our best source of Coca-Cola. But by chance, I had one more encounter with the US Army. Some time later, after a children’s party, I was offered a lift home in a US staff-car. Instead of a utilitarian jeep, this was an enormous Packard, and my fellow passenger in the grey quilted upholstery of the back seat was a US Army general. I did not catch the name of my benefactor as we rustled through streets suddenly drained of noise by the tight-fitting windows. He was a dapper man, extremely bright and sharp with sharp creases, and a fore-and-aft cap cleaving the air like the bow of an Atlantic liner. He had an affable manner, not at all put out to be chatting with a young boy, and he told me many interesting and gory details from the Japanese campaigns in which he had served. Among the enemy he had formed a passion – so he told me – for the art, the mystique, of samurai swords. He admired everything about them – the glamour, the workmanship, the beauty, the efficiency, the murderous ease of the swift cutting strokes. He collected them avidly, and just that day another specimen had come into his hands. He had it in the car. Then reaching behind he took a sword from the back window-ledge and began to slide the slippery silver serpent out of its black lacquered sheath. I stared at the blade, with a chased design – a dragon? – that undulated towards the still hidden point.

  ‘Just look at that,’ said the general with rapt attention. ‘I’ve seen one of these beauties slice right through the stock of a rifle.’

  With a sigh he snapped the bl
ade back into the sheath, giving the lacquer a quick rub with his sleeve. ‘My goodness, yes,’ he murmured, ‘that’s some piece of work.’ Somehow I got the impression that whatever had happened in the Far East was fully justified if it put such treasures into the hands of the connoisseurs.

  *

  Amid the acts of war, any strange city that keeps itself at peace though still big and bustling, will be a refuge, however alien the place and language. Delhi had its share of poor souls sprung loose from familiar moorings, floundering on a tide they could not fathom. They got a grip on any plank that came by and struck against the current, to break out of the rush towards oblivion. Pride and some dignity were the first things lost in shipwreck. If you were wise, you let them go without tears. Desperation, a schoolmaster told me once, gives greater strength than a pedigree back to Charlemagne.

  Two of those souls bobbed up on our little portion of the beach. A Czech husband and wife came knocking on the doors of the Edward VII Hostel carrying a large black portfolio. They were vague gentle beings, bordering on defeated late middle-age, with little to set against the flood but the husband’s slight talent as an artist. He did portraits, in pencil, ink or pastel, specializing in children. Laying out the specimens from the portfolio they haggled quietly in cracked English, relying on helplessness more than on argument. The prices were not high. Most of the discussion centred on how many sittings would be needed. He would rather not be rushed – he had old-world standards of commitment. It was the task of the wife to keep young sitters quiet by reading them stories.

  My mother was drawn towards this couple, feeling their isolation in a tough world and admiring their dogged determination to make the best of their resources. The portraits, though pleasantly done and lifelike, were hardly more than competent. But the Czechs themselves were pathetic in the proper sense, being the cause of heightened emotion in others. So an agreement was struck and a number of sittings booked, to take place in our quarters. The problem then was to get my brother and myself lassooed and in place and settled for a half-hour or so of boredom. No one had asked if we wanted our portraits done.

  At that time we were seriously employed learning how to smoke. Both our parents were veritable chimneys. The cost, for army officers, was negligible. Cigarettes piled up in our home like log-booms in flood-tide. The tins of fifty Players, the foil ripped off, were never far from any needy hand. To slip a few in the pocket was the work of a moment. It hardly seemed like stealing. Then we retired to a broken wilderness at the end of the grounds where a great many cement bags had been dumped, hardening through monsoon rains into a fortress of many runs and tunnels in which secretive boys could conduct certain experiments. Puffing away with anguished faces, trying to inhale, we were testing which was more satisfactory, our parents’ Players or the native bidis of the bazaar, a mixture (or so I was told) of cow-dung and tobacco wrapped very thinly in a coarse leaf.

  So sometimes I was rather groggy when summoned to a sitting. When we were settled in the right light – the artist worked on us both at the same time, in small attacks – the wife began to read from a well-thumbed volume of English folk-tales that she dug out of a deep disorderly bag. Her voice was clogged with strange stresses and pronunciation. When she tried to put some animation into the story, accents clung to the wrong syllables, the rhythm staggered and limped. The result was peculiar and not without charm, at least for a while. The folk-tales I knew well, but now I heard them anew in the dreamy distortions of her weary, garbled English. Sometimes the drift of the story became so foggy that I had to interrupt her and ask her to go back to some landmark still showing valiantly above the miasma of misplaced sounds. She was not offended and repeated herself with as little clarity as before.

  All the while the husband laid down his slow lines. He said nothing beyond a request for a slight turn of the head, or a tilt of the chin. He worked patiently, well-used to the fidgeting of young sitters. There was resignation in everything he did, in the strokes of pencil or chalk or crayon, in the deliberate gathering up of material at the end of the session, in the formality of each day’s leave-taking, a handshake and a hint of a bow, and then the two Czechs, in tandem in work as in life, stepped carefully into the perspiring streets, her arm in his, his soft fine hair flopping a little with each solemn stride.

  ‘I don’t know how they survive,’ said my mother, when the portraits were finished and paid for, and the Czechs departed for the last time, as composed as ever, but permitting themselves the valedictory of a wan smile and a little click of the heels. ‘What will they live off in the future, when all of us are gone?’

  *

  That, too, was the question puzzling my father. In the great hollow halls of the Secretariat, under the whirr of the fans, he was trying to find an answer, not for the Czechs or others blown in by mischance, but for all of us in the family of the Indian Army.

  My father’s dark eyes, ringed with fatigue, made a mute appeal to the departing gods of certainty and order. The calmest of men when the pieces of life fitted easily he was jolted and shocked by fractured plans. His temper became unreliable. He was always stiff with children but now his stiffness creaked. And goodness knows our conduct was hard to endure. Too often playfulness turned to snarling and scrapping and banging the furniture about like a couple of washed-up comics whose act had gone wrong, gone mean and vindictive. We began to fight grimly, with all the venom of young animal natures. The howls and tears transfixed our mother. I saw her stand – not that I cared – with her hands over her ears and her eyes squeezed shut. In an angry despair she reported the fights to her husband. ‘Do something, for goodness’ sake, you’re their father,’ she pleaded before flouncing off to a neutral room. Father was very stern with threats and warnings, but he would not hit a child.

  Then one day I cheeked him too far. He collared me and rushed me to their bedroom and aimed a few brisk blows to my bottom with a long-handled hairbrush. Immediately, my mother came running, wild-eyed, tears springing forth to mix with my hot tears of anger. ‘How could you, you brute?’ she wailed, scooping me out of his perjured hands and slamming the door behind her. My father beat a retreat with as much dignity as he could muster. The family, always a puzzle to him, was another institution that did not meet his canons of rationality. Settling into his favourite chair he barricaded himself behind the yellow cover of another Gollancz crime novel.

  We were waiting for something, all of us in our different ways. Some crackle in the air, some electric jumpiness, was stretching nerves. What was it? Naturally, grown-ups did not confide in young boys. And in any case my father was a man hemmed in by reticence and caution. He kept secrets between himself and the office. His way of doing things did not change, just became heavier and more deliberate. In better times he liked to sing and he had a good ear but a booming untrained voice – a barrelhouse baritone. He would set up a lusty bawling in the bath, humming tunes from Offenbach, or bouncing through the lyrics of Gilbert and Sullivan (he knew several of the Savoy Operas by heart). But now there was silence in the bathroom.

  I got it into my head that the event towards which we were all stumbling was the victory parade for VJ Day – the celebration for the defeat of Japan and the final end to the war. There was a buzz of preparation through February into early March of 1946. Scaffolding for temporary stands was going up along the length of King’s Way. My brother and I, living so close, were often on hand to keep an eye on progress and to get in the way of workers. The incomplete structure made a fine gymnasium for jungle leaps and swings. Tarzan was well-known to us and Johnny Weismuller, he of the royal mane of hair and the swelling pectorals, was our hero. The days were radiant, the weather as comfortable as it ever gets in Delhi. After our work-out we liked to strip, sometimes down to nothing, and take a plunge in the shallow ornamental ponds of the processional way, from which we emerged with hollering policemen on our tails, taking half-hearted swishes with their lathis discreetly to our rear, as if shooing petulant geese.

&nbs
p; When the day came – 7 March – everyone agreed that it was a notable tamasha, a fine celebration. There, on the saluting base, was victory-through-empire made manifest. Viceroy Wavell, that blunt little warrior, with suffused face and massed medals held himself rigid for two hours of marching pomp, with tanks and big guns clanking by. Commander-in-Chief Auchinleck cast an affectionate eye on his men of the Indian Army, the dogsbodies of far-flung triumphs so unimaginably distant – in Mesopotamia, in the Western Desert, in Sicily and Italy, in Burma – from Dogra hill-village or Tamil seaside shanty. Later, sitting on the ground in the midst of soldiers and holding a folded chapati in his right hand, Auchinleck gave his troops their burra khana, their great feast.

  In the evening fireworks invaded the heavens – haloes of light, starbursts, sky etchings, multicoloured washes of brightness flushing the monuments of Lutyens – ‘in the true Moghul style’.

  Thus I remember it. But when I have read about it I see something extra, a more sombre picture. The fighting men marched but Congress boycotted the parade, holding a large counter-demonstration in the Old City. As rockets wooshed and zoomed around India Gate, rioters set the Town Hall on fire; then amid the other explosions guns spat in earnest, and rioters fell dead or wounded. From the India Office in London the Pethick-Lawrence commission had flashed through orders for a rushed constitutional change that Wavell could not be trusted to carry out. Mountbatten, the smooth snake in the constitutional grass, had arrived in India and was biding his time, making the awe due to royalty, a breezy sailor’s charm and a compliant wife, work for him.